Tag Archives: Star Trek The Next Generation

William Shatner’s documentary Chaos on the Bridge is a fascinating look into the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and why, to be blunt, it sucked. A revolving door of writers that couldn’t handle the miserable working conditions imposed upon them by the increasingly ailing Gene Roddenberry and his impish lawyer Leonard Maizlish, and a novice cast struggling to navigate through the inconsistent, dramatically dull scripts that dribbled out, resulted in a mediocre series clinging to existence only by the loyalty of its fans. But by the commencement of the third season in late 1989 and the arrival of new showrunner Michael Piller who moved the series away from aliens-of-the-week plots toward stories centered on the characters, momentum began to shift. The Next Generation got good. Really good. And with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier having proven a massive box office disappointment, the burden of leading the franchise itself had seemingly shifted to the new, fresh and suddenly vigorous series. Was there room for another silver screen adventure for the aging Captain Kirk and company?

Producer Harve Bennett, who had shepherded the movie series since The Wrath of Khan, did not think so. Asked to come up with an idea for a sixth film, Bennett enlisted The Final Frontier‘s screenwriter David Loughery to write an origin story that would involve the first meeting of Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy and let them be played by younger and presumably cheaper actors (John Cusack as Spock was floated as a possibility – get your heads around that one.) Paramount executives were keen but wondered if it would be at all possible to include the original stars in some way. Loughery added book-ending scenes that would feature Shatner and Nimoy in cameos, and set the main story instead as an extended flashback. Bennett received the green light and was beginning pre-production when he found himself victim to the Wrath of the Fans. Roddenberry, who had learned of the concept as it was developed, railed against it at conventions as akin to the execrable Police Academy movies. The supporting cast (Doohan, Koenig, Nichols and Takei) who would find themselves out of work if this movie went ahead, were equally and publicly disdainful. Pressure began to build. Finally, when studio head Martin Davis was informed that the next Star Trek movie would not involve the regulars but rather a new group of younger actors with Shatner and Nimoy appearing only briefly, he put his foot down and demanded a full classic Star Trek movie. Bennett was asked to shelve his Academy concept for the time being and produce Davis’ requested movie first. Bennett chose to walk. In a panic to try and put a movie together in time for Star Trek‘s 25th anniversary in the fall of 1991, Paramount went back to the man who had had a direct creative hand in each of the most successful Star Trek movies to date: Leonard Nimoy.

Appointed the executive producer of Star Trek VI, Nimoy reached out to Nicholas Meyer to collaborate on a story ripped from the headlines of the day: the Berlin Wall coming down in space, with the role of the Soviet Union being played by the Klingon Empire. Nimoy was also the first choice of the studio to direct, but as Shatner was also alleged to be keen on another shot to atone for the misfired Star Trek V, Nimoy suggested Meyer as a compromise instead of himself to avoid bruising his longtime friend’s ego. That would not be the toughest battle the movie would face before a single frame could be filmed, and in our blissful ignorance as fans merely waiting out the expected few years before the inevitable next movie, we came very close to not getting a Star Trek VI at all: studio politics reared its hideous hydra head, with meddling executives forcing Nimoy to accept a pair of unproductive writers he didn’t want to work with (the writers and the executives were eventually fired, though the former did ultimately get screen credit thanks to the rules of the Writers’ Guild), and nickel-and-dime bickering on the budget between Meyer and other studio suits until finally, the entire production was cancelled. In a last ditch effort to salvage the movie, Meyer went hat-in-hand to Paramount president Stanley Jaffe, who in a snap gracious decision granted him every cent of the budget he needed – and shortly thereafter, the suits who had tried to strangle Star Trek VI in its crib were themselves shown the door. Nimoy, Meyer, and screenwriter Denny Martin Flinn could get on with the business of crafting the script to everyone’s satisfaction.

Not that this was any easier. This was to be a movie about the old soldiers of the Federation coming to terms with their prejudices about their mortal enemy, and as such, the script included our heroes speaking racist dialogue about the Klingons – an unappetizing task for the minority actors in the cast. Nichelle Nichols refused to say lines like “Would you want your daughter to marry one?” and “Guess who’s coming to dinner,” while Brock Peters, returning from The Voyage Home as Starfleet Admiral Cartwright, could not get through his speech about Klingons as alien trash and bringing them “to their knees” in a single take. For his part, William Shatner had huge problems with his line “Let them die!” and asked for a reaction shot to indicate that Kirk was embarrassed at having blurted that out (it wasn’t – the movie cuts immediately to Spock). Gene Roddenberry, his health giving out after decades of living large, was appalled by the militaristic and angry tone of the script – hard not to empathize with if you were watching the characters you had created being turned into bigots – and he was especially upset at the proposed reveal of Lt. Saavik as a traitor. Meyer dismissed Roddenberry’s objections, arguing that he created Saavik and could do whatever he wanted with her, but the point was rendered moot when Kirstie Alley declined to return, Robin Curtis was not even asked, and Saavik became Valeris when Kim Cattrall was cast instead. Roddenberry’s objections were noted and filed, and shooting finally commenced in April 1991, on re-dressed sets from The Next Generation, while it was on its summer hiatus. Roddenberry would get one last look at the nearly-completed film in late October; he was wheeled into a screening attached to an oxygen tank, and while he left giving a positive review, he immediately got his lawyer Maizlish involved and tried to have almost a quarter of the movie cut out. Two days later, Roddenberry was dead, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country premiered in December 1991 without any cuts, but with a brief opening dedication: For Gene Roddenberry.

Taking the suggestion that one should always start a story with a bang somewhat literally, Star Trek VI opens with a massive explosion amidst an endless backdrop of stars: the Klingon moon Praxis, the Empire’s key energy production facility, goes full Chernobyl (a deliberate allusion) and disrupts the travels of the starship U.S.S. Excelsior, now under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) on a mission to catalogue gaseous planetary anomalies. Two months later, Captain Kirk and his remaining, soon-to-retire crew are summoned to a briefing at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, where the Federation’s special envoy – Spock – advises that the Klingon economy has been crippled by the Praxis explosion and that they have requested negotiations with the Federation to end the fifty-year cold war between the two galactic superpowers. Captain Kirk and the Enterprise have been assigned to escort the Klingon Chancellor to Earth for a peace summit, despite Kirk’s history with the Klingons, because of the old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China.” Kirk berates Spock for putting him in this position, when as the father of an only son who was murdered by Klingons, he is content to let them all die. Orders are orders however, and the Enterprise, with its new helm officer (and Spock protégé) Lt. Valeris (Kim Cattrall) sets a course for the Neutral Zone. The first meeting with Gorkon (David Warner), his daughter Azetbur (Rosana DeSoto) and his Shakespeare-quoting chief of staff General Chang (Christopher Plummer) is an uneasy one: despite Gorkon’s progressive outlook toward the “undiscovered country” of the unknown future, old prejudices simmer during a diplomatic dinner, and Gorkon advises a wary Kirk that if there is to be a brave new world, their generation will have the hardest time living in it.

In the middle of the night, the Enterprise abruptly seems to fire two photon torpedoes at Gorkon’s ship, crippling its gravity. Two men wearing Starfleet uniforms and walking with magnetic boots beam aboard, murder several of its crew, and gravely wound the chancellor. An enraged Chang threatens to fire back; Kirk keeps the Enterprise‘s shields down and surrenders, then beams over with Dr. McCoy to help. Gorkon’s wounds are too deep and McCoy doesn’t know the Klingon anatomy. Gorkon dies, but not before pleading with Kirk with his last breath, “Don’t let it end this way, Captain.” Chang has Kirk and McCoy immediately arrested for Gorkon’s murder, and Azetbur, appointed chancellor in her father’s place, agrees to continue with the peace talks in his memory at a secret location, but on the promise that the prisoners will not be extradited, and Starfleet will make no attempt to rescue them. At a subsequent show trial where they are defended by the same-named grandfather of The Next Generation‘s Worf (Michael Dorn), a recording of Kirk’s log in which says he will never trust or forgive the Klingons for the death of his son is played, and he and McCoy are found guilty. They are spared the usual sentence of death and instead condemned to the prison planet Rura Penthe, the “alien’s graveyard.”

Back on the Enterprise, Spock and the remainder of the crew play for time with Starfleet Command by claiming engine trouble. They still have a full complement of torpedoes, so someone else must have fired on Gorkon’s ship from beneath them to make it seem as though it was the Enterprise. Because the Klingons did not notice it, it might have been a cloaked Bird-of-Prey; normally Birds-of-Prey cannot fire when cloaked, but this (hypothetical) one can. And since someone altered the computer records to indicate the Enterprise fired the torpedoes, there must be a conspirator or conspirators in their very midst. The search is on for the two pairs of magnetic boots the killers were described by witnesses to have been wearing, and when Chekov discovers a trace of Klingon blood on the Enterprise‘s transporter pad, the search expands to uniforms. The boots are subsequently found in the locker of an innocent alien ensign (whose broad webbed feet reveal he couldn’t possibly have worn them), stalling the investigation.

Meanwhile, Kirk and McCoy struggle to survive the harsh conditions of Rura Penthe, with some unexpected help from a beautiful shapeshifting alien named Martia (the late David Bowie’s wife Iman). She uses her abilities to facilitate their escape from the underground prison camp and across the glaciers beyond the magnetic shield that prevents transporter beaming, while the Enterprise warps through Klingon territory to find them before they freeze to death, aided by a tracking patch Spock placed on Kirk’s back before they boarded Gorkon’s ship. It turns out Martia is a plant, offered a pardon to make it look like Kirk and McCoy were killed attempting escape, and the prison warden arrives with his men and disintegrates Martia for her trouble. Before the warden can reveal who wants them dead, Kirk and McCoy are beamed to safety aboard the Enterprise. Scotty finds the missing uniforms stained by Klingon blood, and the bodies of the two assassins are discovered: two racist, low-ranking crewmembers we saw being berated by Valeris earlier, phaser-stunned to the head at close range. Kirk tries a gambit of broadcasting a bluff over the ship’s intercom indicating that the two assassins are alive in sickbay and ready to give statements, and when someone arrives to finish the job, it turns out to be Valeris herself. Valeris arranged for Kirk’s log to be used at his trial, and reprogrammed the computers to suggest the Enterprise had fired the torpedoes. Spock is angrier than we have ever seen him at his student’s betrayal, and when Valeris will not reveal her co-conspirators, he extracts the names from her mind via mind-meld: General Chang, Starfleet Admiral Cartwright and the Romulan ambassador.

Kirk contacts Sulu to learn the location of the rescheduled peace conference which is beginning today: Camp Khitomer, near the Romulan border. The two ships proceed to Khitomer at maximum warp, but as another assassin sets up his sniping post in the Khitomer auditorium, our heroes are waylaid in orbit by Chang and his cloaked Bird-of-Prey, which batters them invisibly until Uhura has the notion to use the gaseous planetary anomaly cataloguing equipment (there’s a mouthful!) to sniff out the Bird-of-Prey’s tailpipe. Spock and McCoy reprogram a torpedo as the Enterprise‘s shields collapse and the assassin takes aim at the Federation’s President (Kurtwood Smith). The torpedo is fired, Chang sees it coming and with a last quote of Hamlet(“To be… or not… to be”), his ship is destroyed by a barrage from both the Enterprise and the Excelsior. Kirk beams down to the conference and jumps on the President to knock him out of the way of the fatal phaser shot. Scotty stuns the assassin and knocks him from his perch to a plunging death, and Sulu arrests the fleeing Admiral Cartwright. Kirk addresses Chancellor Azetbur and the assembly and gives a conciliatory speech in which he admits his faults and says that for some people, the future and change can be a very frightening thing. Azetbur replies that he has restored her father’s faith. Kirk says that she has restored his son’s. The assembly – including a reluctant Klingon delegation – gives them a standing ovation.

In orbit again, Kirk says thank you and farewell to Captain Sulu and the Excelsior, and when a message from Starfleet comes in ordering the Enterprise home for decommissioning, Spock advises a cheeky reply of “go to hell.” Kirk asks for a course set “second star to the right, and straight on until morning.” In a shoutout to The Next Generation, his final log entry addresses a future crew who will continue the voyages to all the undiscovered countries and boldly go where no man… “where no one…” has gone before. And in a final “sign off,” the signatures of the original cast of seven fly across the screen before the credits roll.

As a finale to the adventures of the original Star Trek crew, and one that studio meddling almost kiboshed before it even began, The Undiscovered Country is an immensely satisfying experience, proving that the stumbles of the previous movie aside, there was still a fair chunk of dilithium left in the tank. I wouldn’t even say it’s bittersweet, in that there is very little bitterness left once the last credit slides by. As fans, we knew it couldn’t go on forever, and this is a near-perfect goodbye. In a time when The Simpsons was airing Star Trek XII: So Very Tired gags, this movie uses the advanced age of its cast as a starting point for its story, asking – even point-blank in one third-act scene between Kirk and Spock – if we are all fated to reach a point in our lives where we become so entrenched in our ways that we cannot adapt to an era that is starting to evolve beyond us, and if that constitutes a joke. It would not have done to have these people running around acting like twenty-year-olds; not only would that be embarrassing, but a waste of a storytelling opportunity that is rarely presented in films that are so often geared largely toward the appetites of the young. Nimoy, Meyer and Flinn aren’t afraid to talk about the challenges of growing old, and the accordingly assured cast is not afraid to play it either, framed by a whodunit, a morally ambiguous mystery that is unique among Star Trek films usually more straightforward in their narratives with the roles of good and evil clearly defined. With Meyer’s hand in the script, we can again play our game of Spot the Literary Reference with nods to Sherlock Holmes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Peter Pan, as well as almost the entirety of the First Folio thanks to the verbose General Chang. Meyer includes nods to recent history as well, evoking Hitler, Nixon and even Adlai Stevenson, and the screenplay sounds so much richer for it, making this a high-stakes, consequential drama populated by intelligent, educated characters pitted against one another by political point of view.

Talking of the characters, there seem to be so many of them even given the movie’s restricted budget, and this is arguably the deepest bench of guest cast in any Star Trek film before or since. After being a glorified prop as a human ambassador in Star Trek V, David Warner gets a second try in the Trekverse as the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (named after Gorbachev) and brings great gravitas to a brief role; we wonder how this thoughtful liberal ever managed to achieve the premiership of the extremely conservative Klingon Empire, and lament his not seeing his last dream made real. Rosana DeSoto as his daughter-turned-successor effectively brings the inspired yet weary qualities of a born statesperson to her role as well. The lithe and lovely Iman injects a welcome dose of sinister sex appeal into the second act – even in yellow contact lenses – and Kurtwood Smith, who had just scared the hell out of everyone in Robocop, makes for a contemplative and believable Chief Executive of the Federation. Kim Cattrall as Valeris does well in charting a transformation from a young idealist to an embittered cynic undone by the perversion of her idealism – and she wears the Vulcan ears rather beguilingly at that. The biggest accolades do of course go to Christopher Plummer as the everything-dialed-up-to-11 Chang, who sinks his teeth into each Shakespearean tidbit, tears off the flesh and gnashes it into powdery bits, becoming the most grandly theatrical villain of the Star Trek canon. Where Kirk recognizes his prejudices and refuses to let them interfere with his sense of morality, Chang is Kirk tipped over that fuzzy gray border, sticking to the hardest of lines even in the face of death. Unlike Khan, Chang’s history doesn’t matter. He just blows onto the screen and (nearly) blows everyone else off it. There is also something patriotically amusing in watching the fate of the galaxy being played out between two legendary Canadian actors.

The movie is often described as one of Star Trek‘s darkest – it probably has the highest on-screen body count, the sets are cold and metallic and lit dimly, and Cliff Eidelman’s score begins with an ominous main title theme reminiscent of Holst’s Mars movement from The Planets and rumbles about the bass side of the scale for most of the running time. The shift in comportment of our main family of characters is a bit jarring, too. We’ve seen them in conflict with the Klingons before, but we’ve never seen them this embittered: you’ll recall Kirk tried to help pull Kruge up from the collapsing cliff on Genesis even after he’d ordered the death of Kirk’s son. Here, we get Klingons compared to animals and derided for their smell, and even lovable old Scotty casually refers to Azetbur as a bitch. It’s difficult given those examples not to agree with the late Gene Roddenberry’s objections to the tone of the screenplay. But confronting one’s prejudices is always uncomfortable, and recognizing the swaths of ugliness present in otherwise beautiful and beloved characters is a challenge to ourselves, the audience, to dislodge our own asses from the well-shaped groove of stereotypes that we may hold regarding some of our fellow human beings. Roddenberry harbored a hope that in the future we would evolve beyond our pettiness, and seeing his aspirational creations fall back into those hated patterns must have represented an infuriating triumph of everything he had fought against during his years of battling with the studio to protect what remained of his vision. However, in that Star Trek VI shows Captain Kirk learning to grow beyond hatred of even his most reliable enemy, it stands as a tribute to what Roddenberry wanted for humanity, and what he wanted Star Trek to be. It is a more than fitting farewell to both the original cast and the man who first brought them together.

In summary: Points for the unique mystery aspects of the story, the amazing guest cast (even Christian Slater’s cameo is fun!) and a tremendously exciting, edge-of-your-seat finale coupled with a poignant and hopeful goodbye. Points against: the obvious budget-saving reuse of too many Next Generation sets (the President’s office is just Ten-Forward with some drapes), the fairly obvious reveal of the lone new character on the bridge as the traitor. But we digress, the movie is still one of the best of the bunch.

Next time: Captain Kirk passes the baton to Captain Picard and then has a bridge dropped on him as The Next Generation makes an awkward transition from small screen to big.

“‘Why are they putting seatbelts in theatres this summer?’ To keep the audience from leaving!” – a critic, dissing Star Trek V‘s tagline

Star Trek‘s popularity has waxed and waned over its five decades of existence (!), but one indisputable zenith was late 1986/early 1987, when it was the reigning king of filmed sci-fi entertainment, with rival franchise Star Wars in the midst of a long coma. Not only had The Voyage Home been a critical and box office success, drawing in new fans who previously couldn’t have told you the difference between tribbles and Triskelion, but appetites were further whetted by the announcement of Star Trek‘s return to weekly series television in the form of The Next Generation, scheduled to premiere in September with an all-new cast aboard an all-new U.S.S. Enterprise. The film series was certain to continue as well, to capitalize on this new, warp speed momentum. However, there would be a shuffling of creative personnel behind the scenes first. On the strength of both The Voyage Home and the massive comedy hit Three Men and a Baby, Leonard Nimoy had become one of the hottest, most in-demand directors in Hollywood, and his schedule didn’t permit assuming the reins for the long production process that a new Star Trek movie would entail. Not only that, someone else was champing at the bit to step behind the camera.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy’s respective contracts with Paramount Pictures included what Shatner called “favored nations” clauses, where whatever one received, be it in terms of salary or specific privileges, so would the other. Since Nimoy had now directed two Star Trek movies in a row, Shatner exercised the clause to secure himself the director’s chair for Star Trek V. Freed of the story constraints of the concluded “Genesis Trilogy,” his pitch for a fresh adventure was based on a very 80’s phenomenon: the rise of the televangelist. Though it’s hard to imagine now when a vast majority of us recognize them as money-swindling charlatans, there was a time when the likes of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell were ubiquitous on the airwaves and exerted tremendous influence on the course of world events, with politicians eager to cozy up to them and the ranks of voters they commanded. Shatner had in mind an alien holy man named “Zar” who would be such a powerful, persuasive presence that he would even be able to turn the crew of the Enterprise against each other, with only Kirk able to resist his influence. Zar would engineer a hostage-taking in order to commandeer the ship and set it on a course for the center of the universe to find God – who would turn out to be the Devil in disguise, and Kirk would have to descend into the depths of Hell to rescue Spock and McCoy. Star Trek had employed subtle Christian allegories before, but this was going full-tilt Old Testament, and while Shatner’s story was accepted by the studio higher-ups, it was abundantly clear that elements would have be toned down to satisfy the broadest possible audience. Especially since Paramount was more or less insisting on another movie in the light, airy and funny mode of The Voyage Home – hard to reconcile with Shatner’s operatic vision of winged cherubs transforming into monstrous demons.

Favorite son Nicholas Meyer was unavailable, so Shatner and returning producer Harve Bennett, after approaching acclaimed fantasy novelist Eric van Lustbader (who allegedly wanted an unaffordable $1 million for his services), hired David Loughery (Dreamscape, Flashback) to write the script. The three began extensive revisions on Shatner’s initial treatment to soften the potentially offensive religious tones and inject the laughs deemed critical to retaining the crossover fans who had embraced The Voyage Home. Zar was made less overtly villainous to avoid duplicating elements of Khan, and the revelation of the object of his quest was moved to later in the movie to address Bennett’s caveat that the concept might come off like “Tonight on Star Trek: Captain Kirk meets God!” At one point God was removed entirely, as Bennett and Loughery did a rewrite without Shatner’s participation that had Zar looking for the galactic equivalent of Shangri-La instead, a place they named Sha Ka Ree (a takeoff of the name of Sean Connery, who was Shatner’s first choice to play Zar.) In an echo of Zar’s ability to sway people to his cause, a determined Shatner turned his collaborators one by one back toward his original vision, and they compromised by having Sha Ka Ree become the name of the mythical planet at the center of the galaxy (since there is no scientifically identifiable center of the universe) where God was fabled to reside.

One obstacle the charismatic actor-director couldn’t overcome was his old friend Nimoy. As originally scripted, Spock and McCoy would betray Kirk to aid Zar, and only by healing the rift in their friendship would the three be able to escape Hell in the movie’s climax. Nimoy said there was simply no way Spock would ever betray Kirk, and no matter how much Shatner argued for the potential dramatic impact of the twist, Nimoy was firm. Even changing Zar to Sybok and making him Spock’s half-brother couldn’t persuade Nimoy otherwise – in his view, the bond between Kirk and Spock could not be broken by anything or anyone. DeForest Kelley was equally adamant about McCoy, and so the script was changed again to have Kirk, Spock and McCoy braving the unknown together as always.

With the script – interrupted briefly by the 1988 Writers’ Guild strike – finally taking something resembling shootable shape, the next challenge was the movie’s budget. Like many first-time directors, Shatner was awash in dreams of grand, sweeping camera moves and thousands of extras swarming massive DeMille-inspired sets, a wave which soon broke against the unyielding wall of the studio bottom line. With a relatively modest total of $32 million allocated for Star Trek V, and $12 million of that split by the two lead actors, Shatner had only $20 million for everything else – the rest of the regular cast, any guest stars, and the entirety of the production. Quashed immediately were any illusions of casting the pricey Sean Connery, or Max von Sydow (Shatner’s second choice) as Sybok. Armies of extras were reduced to handfuls. Sprawling sets and scenic vistas would have to be replaced by matte paintings and camera cheats. And in a crippling blow, the visual effects would have to be provided by someone other than the reliable, gold-standard Industrial Light & Magic. Bran Ferren and his Hoboken, New Jersey-based company Associates & Ferren, best known for the trippy visuals in the weird Ken Russell movie Altered States, were hired instead after impressing Shatner and Bennett with a lower-cost, “in the camera” approach where effects could be shot live on stage instead of being added in later. Concerns lingered at how the Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque finale would be pulled off, but time was growing short and shooting had to commence in order to make the movie’s June 1989 release date. In late 1988 Shatner finally got to call action on the movie’s first scheduled scene: unlikely for Star Trek, it was a commercial featuring a skeezy, Herb Tarlek alien type selling worthless plots of land on an alien planet.

Perhaps it was a harbinger of how audiences would eventually receive the movie.

A cold open places us on Tatooine… er, sorry, Nimbus III, the “Planet of Galactic Peace,” a dried out wasteland of a world in the Neutral Zone between the three dominant galactic powers: the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Empire, who have agreed to develop it together but have instead let it fall into disarray. A mysterious Vulcan named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill, the son-in-law of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz), arrives and begins gathering followers, converting them by using his mental abilities to free them of their innermost pain. Sybok and his army storm Paradise City, the capital of Nimbus III, take hostage the Federation, Klingon and Romulan ambassadors, and demand that a starship be sent to negotiate their release. On Earth, Captain Kirk is enjoying a vacation in California’s Yosemite National Park with Spock and McCoy, while Sulu and Chekov are getting lost exploring Mount Rushmore and Scotty and Uhura are left to patch up an Enterprise which has revealed itself to be a lemon following its shakedown cruise. While free-climbing the forbidding face of El Capitan, Kirk loses his grip and falls to a certain death… until he is saved by Spock with the aid of some rocket boots. Kirk ruminates later by the fireside that he knew he wouldn’t die because Spock and McCoy were with him, and that he’s always known he’ll die alone. A round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” whose lyrics Spock struggles to understand, is interrupted by Uhura, who brings word of the hostage crisis on Nimbus III. Despite its mechanical issues, the Enterprise is chosen for the rescue mission because it has the most experienced commander. The starship warps to Nimbus III, while Spock is haunted by the familiar face he sees in the hostage video but is elusive in explaining who it is. Meanwhile, Klaa, a young Klingon captain craving glory in the possibility of defeating the legendary Captain Kirk is ordered to take his ship to Nimbus III as well, and if all else fails, to destroy the planet.

With the transporters out of service thanks to them still running Windows Vista, one supposes, Kirk leaves Chekov to masquerade as the Enterprise‘s captain and stall for time while he leads an “old-fashioned” commando raid aboard the shuttle Galileo down to Paradise City to rescue the hostages. Kirk’s marines attack the compound on (alien) horseback, but swiftly lose the battle with Sybok’s army when the three captive ambassadors reveal themselves to be in league with the renegade Vulcan – who is excited to see Spock again, hinting at a deeper connection between the two. As the Galileo, now under Sybok’s command, returns to the Enterprise, Klaa’s ship arrives, and Kirk orders Sulu to execute a risky maneuver to rocket the shuttle manually into the hangar bay while dodging a Klingon torpedo. In the aftermath of the crash, Spock grabs a weapon, aims it at Sybok and orders him to surrender. Sybok refuses, and despite Kirk’s direct order, Spock cannot bring himself to shoot. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are thrown in the brig, and Sybok takes his followers to the bridge to seize control of the starship, seduce the crew to his cause, and set them on a course to the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy and the fabled planet of Sha Ka Ree rumored to lie beyond it. Behind bars, a furious Kirk cannot believe that Spock would betray him, and Spock finally admits the truth: he and Sybok are brothers. They have the same father, but different mothers; Sybok’s mother was Sarek’s first wife, a Vulcan princess. Sybok has rejected the Vulcan way of logic and embraced emotions, for which he was banished from the planet. While the three heroes sulk, a Morse code message tapped on the wall advises them to stand back, and an explosion set off by Scotty sets them free. Spock suggests sending a distress signal using the emergency equipment in the forward observation room, but that’s several dozen decks above them, and the crew, including Sulu, Uhura and Chekov, is now entirely under Sybok’s influence. Spock’s handy-dandy rocket boots prove the solution, and the signal is sent – only to be intercepted by the Klingons and their excitable captain who is determined to have Kirk’s head.

Sybok tries to sway McCoy and Spock by showing them visions of their innermost pain: McCoy’s decision to euthanize his dying father, and Spock’s rejection by his own father for his human half. He then tries to do the same for Kirk, who refuses by insisting that pain isn’t something to be taken away, it’s what makes us who we are. Spock also tells Sybok that he has long since resolved his inner conflict about his heritage and found his place, and McCoy realizes that he too belongs with his friends. Kirk insists that the ship will not survive the passage through the Great Barrier, while Sybok believes otherwise because of a vision he has received from God, who awaits them there. Sybok’s faith proves the winner as the Enterprise breaches the Barrier with only a mild bit of shaky-cam turbulence and arrives in safe orbit of the glowing blue world of Sha Ka Ree. Sybok permits Kirk, Spock and McCoy to accompany him by shuttle to the surface, which appears at first to be an abandoned, rocky landscape until the sky suddenly darkens, stone pillars shoot up from the ground and a shaft of light bursts into space, inside which appears a figure seemingly drawn from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself.

Is this God? An enraptured Sybok seems to think so. God asks how the foursome came to find him, and declares his intention to make use of the Enterprise to carry his “wisdom” beyond the Barrier to the rest of the galaxy. An abruptly skeptical Kirk asks the pertinent question, “what does God need with a starship?” God responds with a blast of Force lightning into Kirk’s gut. It becomes clear that this is no god, but rather a malevolent alien who has been imprisoned on the planet behind the Great Barrier and wants to use the starship to escape. A remorseful Sybok takes responsibility and challenges “God” to share his pain, sacrificing himself to allow the others to escape as the Enterprise fires on the entity. The transporter is only partly functional (only upgraded to Windows 7), and Kirk orders Scotty to beam up Spock and McCoy first, leaving him alone on the planet with the alien who has been weakened by the torpedo strike but is still very much alive. Before Scotty can beam Kirk up, the Klingon ship commanded by Klaa arrives and attacks the Enterprise, destroying the transporter. Spock tries to persuade the Klingon ambassador, who outranks Klaa, to order his subordinate to stand down. Down on Sha Ka Ree, Kirk runs from the angry “God” alien right into the hovering Klingon vessel, which delivers a crippling blow to the entity before beaming Kirk aboard. Kirk is shocked to receive a formal apology from Captain Klaa, and to see Spock in the gunner’s chair. Kirk says he thought he was going to die, and Spock assures him that he was never alone. Back aboard the Enterprise at a friendly reception, Kirk, Spock and McCoy contemplate notions of friendship, family, and whether God is really out there among the stars. Kirk offers the moral of the movie by opining that maybe the true location of God is within the human heart. A reprise of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” around the campfire, this time with Spock leading the refrain on his Vulcan harp, sends us up into the stars and into the strains of the end credits march.

Good storytelling should always raise questions, but when the answers aren’t forthcoming, or they are answered by way of cop-out, the storyteller should be well prepared to dodge the incoming barrage of rotten vegetables. Accordingly, Star Trek V was a voyage of the damned. Gene Roddenberry’s initial concept for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The God Thing, involved the crew’s encounter with an alien intelligence that would be revealed to have inspired the entire concept of religion on Earth and taken many forms throughout the centuries, including that of Jesus Christ. Captain Kirk would then destroy the alien, thereby “killing God” and establishing that humanity had outgrown the need for religion and the belief in supreme beings. No studio was going to try to sell an atheist treatise in the most evangelical market on the planet, and so when William Shatner tried telling his variation on the same story in Star Trek V with the full intent of having Kirk encounter the real God (who would turn out to be the Devil), he too had to water it down to the idea of a mere alien impersonator instead. When Sybok announces that his vision was “given to me by God. He waits for us on the other side,” we’re as skeptical as Kirk, not because we’re siding with the hero but because our suspension of disbelief has suddenly been shattered. There’s no way they’re going to meet the actual God, we say to ourselves. This is a Star Trek movie, not The Passion of the Christ. They don’t have the balls to go there, not for real. For Shatner and his storytelling partners, it’s lose-lose. Depicting the Judeo-Christian God just upsets everyone who isn’t Judeo-Christian. Depicting God at all upsets humanists. Not depicting Him/Her/Them when you announce you’re going to smacks of cowardice, even if the assertion that God is to be found in the heart is a worthy observation. There’s simply no way for this story to end in a satisfactory manner, and so the entire journey to The Final Frontier has ultimately been a wasted trip. You can’t fault William Shatner for his ambition, indeed, there is a certain amount of admirable daring in the choice to pursue these sorts of questions in a popular studio franchise film. But the execution just isn’t there; flawed, weak writing (and dodgy special effects compounding its sins) undermines the best efforts of the rest of the cast and crew.

Despite what general consensus would have you believe, this is not a movie without a solitary ounce of merit or virtue. There are a few standouts to appreciate herein and make it worthy of a rewatch or three on a rainy day. Some of the location shooting is quite lovely, and it’s always welcome in a franchise usually restricted to soundstages. Laurence Luckinbill, a veteran stage actor who was cast as Sybok after Shatner saw him on PBS in a one-man show about Lyndon Johnson, projects a great deal of charisma and surprising empathy as the ostensible villain. When Sybok is persuading others to share their pain, yes, he’s doing it to manipulate them into helping him, but you still get a strong sense that he genuinely cares about the people and wants to free them of their burdens. He is, in his Vulcan heart, a good man doing the wrong thing for noble reasons, and his recognition that he has erred and placed possibly the entire galaxy in jeopardy makes him not so much a villain but a tragic, misguided hero. This creates a rather paradoxical effect where Sybok becomes in fact the protagonist of the movie, as it is his arc pushing the plot forward, while Kirk, Spock and McCoy become the antagonists trying to stop him at every turn. This reversal of roles didn’t sit particularly well with the audiences of the day as it’s not the position we’re comfortable seeing our heroes in. We want them leading the adventure, not dragged along by somebody else. But if we have to be, then we’re at least glad to have the legendary Jerry Goldsmith scoring our journey. His music is more romantic and melodic here, with a few pops of ethnic percussion instruments for alien flavor, rather than the icy, electronic tones that backed the voyage of V’Ger in The Motion Picture, and Goldsmith, unlike his immediate predecessor Leonard Rosenman, knows when to stay the hell out of the way of the action and when it’s appropriate to strut boldly to the forefront. Goldsmith also provides some welcome musical continuity by reprising both the opening march and the Klingon theme from his first effort.

Ultimately though, and disappointingly, the virtues of the movie are too few to rate a final judgment in favor. Bran Ferren’s spare effects are no substitute for ILM’s mastery of the sci-fi genre, and his low-cost approach only makes the movie look patched together and small. This is particularly glaring once “God” enters the scene, and the final chase between “Him” and Kirk is a haphazard mess of flipped shots and half-finished effects that are substituting for an even worse effect that never made it to the screen – where “God” was to assume the form of a hulking, lumbering creature of living rock that would have embarrassed Ed Wood (photos of it do exist online – Google and beware). When the whole movie has been building to this point, and we’re still prepared to grant it some goodwill, to have it finish so crappily and cheaply is a huge letdown. The decision to include humor in the screenplay again wasn’t necessarily misguided, but the approach certainly is, with the warm character-based humor of The Voyage Home being usurped by lame wisecracks about “marsh melons” and slapstick gags that have us laughing at our heroes, not with them. I recall many guffaws seeing Scotty knock himself out on a pipe in the trailer, but in the movie the moment just seems sad, as does watching the noble and inspiring Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) reduced to doing a naked fan dance. This character inspired Martin Luther King, for God’s sake – she deserves so much better than what probably split sides in the all-male writers’ room but is a real embarrassment to Star Trek as a whole.

Audiences of the day agreed, and Star Trek V, released in the same summer slot as Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, took in less than half the box office of Star Trek IV, with critics panning it top to bottom and William Shatner earning the dubious honor of that year’s Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Actor and Director. Unlike Nimoy, Shatner would never get the chance to direct another major feature, and would turn his attention instead to television and documentaries. Piling on to The Final Frontier is easy – as I said it’s the go-to punch line for all that was ever terrible about Star Trek, but I certainly wouldn’t categorize it as the worst would-be blockbuster movie released in 1989 (Ghostbusters II was pretty phone-it-in abysmal); in the end the best that can be said of it is that it is something of a noble failure. You certainly get the sense that everyone involved (except maybe Ferren) is trying their absolute best to make a great movie that is telling a meaningful story. But the odd-number curse holds true here, and with The Next Generation slowly increasing in popularity it seemed for a time that The Final Frontier would be the final frontier for the original cast.

In summary: Points for ambition, Luckinbill, Goldsmith, location shooting and the best of intentions. Major demerits for making fun of our characters instead of embracing them, Ferren’s shoddy effects work, and a leaden premise with an unsolvable ending.

Next time: First inklings of an origin story for Kirk and Spock give way to an exciting whodunit that brings the original cast together for the last time, led by the redoubtable Nicholas Meyer in his (then) farewell to Star Trek.

Try to picture me now, six foot three inches of hangdog pout, twisting the toes of one foot back and forth on the floor in shame at having let something sit for far too long. A month or so back I was nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award, and like a lazy farmer wondering why the crops aren’t doing anything when the seeds haven’t been planted yet, I let this sit, and sit, and recede into the shallows of memory, assuring myself that I would indeed get around to it. Terrible. Well, after a few other projects have been swept from the deck, here I am finally, getting around to said thing. Despite my drag-assedness, I’m deeply grateful to the four stellar talents who were kind enough to nominate this tiny corner of the Internets: Michelle Gordon, Jessica West, Nillu Stelter and Debbie Vega. Thank you so very much ladies! Keep being awesome, and more to the point, keep writing awesomely. And sorry I’ve taken so long to accept your generous nomination!

The rules for this particular honor are: thank the person(s) who nominated you (check!), disclose seven interesting factoids about yourself, and nominate fifteen more deserving winners. As regards the seven interesting facts about myself, well… I’m not really that interesting a person. I can string words together pretty well on paper and I’m okay at parties until my material runs out, but you’d probably brush past me on the street and not even realize I was there. I suppose I write fiction to make up for the tame trappings of an average, middle-class upbringing and ongoing life. But if you’re looking to be regaled by recollections of jaunts through the African savanna or the backstreet jazz clubs of New Orleans or rubbing elbows with the famous and the powerful, you’ve clicked on the wrong link. It’s why I have to try to captivate you with my words; the rest of me won’t do it. Regardless, here goes with a few things you might not otherwise know about me.

1. As noted above, I am six-foot-three, shuffling along in a world designed for the five-foot-six. This means a chronic case of slouching and a neck somewhat out of alignment from leaning forward to look down. It also means, for whatever reason, strangers predisposed to think you are athletic. I am incredibly not. I marvel at shorter folks who can run marathons – I’m wrecked after a half-walked 5K. At the risk of sounding a bit Dangerfield-esque about it, I was such a lousy athlete as a child that even the teachers picked me last. Can’t throw, can’t hit, can’t kick, can’t field. And to think that a childhood dream (swiftly extinguished by reality) was pitching in major league baseball. Nope – closest I’ll get is field level seats, and you know what? I’m totally okay with that.

2. When I was a teenager, I drew comic books. This is similar to #1 in that I cannot really draw, either. My character was an anthropomorphised simian version of James Bond (for the simple reason that monkeys were easier to draw than humans) and I did seven books with him, only four of which were finished. The last one, that part of me regrets not completing, was a James Bond-Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover, in which Bond fell for Dr. Crusher. And because I couldn’t draw, the story was a lot of dialogue and character development as opposed to splash pages of pencil-crayoned ass kicking. Doing these books did teach me a great deal about how to create character beats and arcs, how to plot, and how to sharpen the storytelling edge to finish within the number of pages left in the purloined school exercise book.

3. I usually wear at least one piece of Disney-related clothing on any given day. It started a few years ago with one solitary T-shirt; now the wardrobe has expanded considerably through ties, boxers and other apparel, and I’m writing this with a grinning Mickey Mouse displayed proudly on the left breast of my black golf shirt. We’ve added Olaf to our growing empire of stuffed animals; he’s on a shelf in our living room, enjoying the summer and peering down at the mischievous kittens who are plotting to knock him from his lofty perch.

4. Speaking of kittens, after we said goodbye to our beloved Muffins, we acquired two new furry friends to carry on her legacy: siblings Dudley and Daila. Dudley is an orange tabby while Daila is a tortoiseshell, and while they are both very sweet, Dudley is a master thief! He has stolen articles of clothing, stress balls, batteries and keys, but his favorite target is pieces of fruit, specifically, bananas. We have to hide any bananas we buy in the microwave, otherwise we’ll wake up in the morning with a banana in our bed. Last weekend Dudley figured out how to open the desk drawer in our kitchen, and pilfered a ball of string. Even though we were proud (and a tad terrified) of his ingenuity, we were somewhat disappointed at his descent into cliche. It’s all right, he’s young, he’ll grow up and be quoting Proust before you know it. (A la recherche du souris perdu, anyone?)

5. My wife and I are part of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, and we mentor a young boy we’ve known since he was nine. It was a year and a half after we met him that we were introduced to the then-11-year-old who would become our adopted son. So you don’t have to be a major in anything to connect those dots and realize that the experience of mentoring made us realize that we could parent an older child. A project still lingering on the backburner is a detailed article about being a mentor which I’m hoping to get finished in the next couple of weeks, so watch this space for updates on that.

6. The infamous novel to which I have alluded from time to time is still working its way through the query trenches, now numbering 11 rejections all told. I refuse to accept that this is a trend, and I soldier on. One rather disappointing (yet interesting) tale from this process is having a Twitter pitch for it favorited by one particular agent after she had already rejected the query and sample chapters, which were sent to her because she favorited the same pitch in a prior Twitter contest. (She was great about it though.) With that sort of thing, you just have to laugh and keep going. There was another form rejection I received that was so apologetic I almost felt I should have responded, assuring the agent that I didn’t take it personally and that I wasn’t going to go fledermaus-scheise on her. Probably a result of too many wannabes doing just that. As an aside to any literary agent out there who might be reading this, I promise promise PROMISE that I won’t be a jerkwad if you say no to me. I’m taking a stand against that crap. I may even develop a variation of the Serenity Prayer for rejected writers, or something more basic, like “I will not break, I will not bend, I will not turn into a raging douche-a-holic.”

7. And lastly, I have struggled with my hair since as long as I can remember. The avatar I use for all my social media profiles is one of the rare few pictures in which I find it looks somewhat respectable, instead of like a wildebeest flayed by a helicopter rotor.

Ok then! Onwards to the third part of this here deal. Versatility to me suggests, at least by its dictionary definition, individuals with a wide range of skills. Applied to blogging it would therefore seem to mean people who write well about a lot of different subjects. This runs contrary to most blogging advice, which posits that in order to build an audience you should focus on one topic you know really well and then just write the bejeezus out of that, rather than trying to be good for all time zones. I suppose that when you become established as a “voice” that others seek out, you are then freer to weigh in on whatever you want, as opposed to trying to build a niche audience from nothing. Some blogs I follow are informative writing resources, others are pop culture treasure troves, others still are founts of creativity expressed through wildly imaginative fiction. What they share, however, are voices I look forward to hearing, and find myself missing when absent.

You’ve been bearing with me for this long, and I want to shake it up and end on something of a twist, so here it is: rather than list fifteen names and links you won’t click on, I’m going to do Q&A’s with each person I nominate. I enjoyed hosting Emmie Mears in June and it’s given me the itch to do some more of that there stuff. I just think you’ll get more of a sense of why I admire these writers, and it’ll give them a chance to talk about what drives them, what scares them, what they’re after and what they want their legacy to be. None of this fill-in-the-blank, true-or-false quick answer claptrap, we’re going to dive deep down, tug at the heart and probe the soul. I’m gonna be the Brian Linehan of the blogging world if it kills me. (I am aware that Brian Linehan is dead, so that could be taken the wrong way. I meant in the sense of his detailed interviewing style.) And each will of course be asked for their favorite swear word.

This might take a while so don’t expect all fifteen to show up in the next week, or even the next couple of months – it’ll be an ongoing feature here and I’ll categorize them so they’re easy for you to find. To my unwitting subjects: watch your Twitter DM’s and your email inboxes, like so many arrows loosed by an intrepid archer, or darts flung at a perforated cork board by a drunken punter round the pub, my questions will be coming for you. Mwa ha ha.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek again. Or more to the point, I’ve been watching The Next Generation on Netflix, that is, when I’m not working, writing, taking media courses or running copious errands. Ever since I became a father, television has dropped several ranks on the priority list. My wife and I were joking the other night about how we used to lie on opposite couches on a Sunday afternoon and mumble to each other, “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” That boredom was so frustrating at the time; now it’s looked back upon with reverence and longing. We’d murder for a boring day like that.

When our son came to us his taste in TV was a bit, shall we say, delayed. Cartoons well below his age level were the go-to. Trying to encourage him to take a step ahead we suggested he give TNG a go, figuring he’d grok the whiz-bang of the space battles while subliminally processing the messages. And of course we’d be happy to watch it with him. So what began as an exercise in maturity for our lad has turned into a nostalgic trip for myself.

Some of these episodes I haven’t seen in a decade or more, and it’s sometimes sad to realize that what enthralled you as a teenager can come off to a more seasoned palate as cheap, juvenile or otherwise lacking. That first season in particular was really rough going, in terms of the writing, the acting (with the sole exception of the masterful Patrick Stewart, probably the only reason anything worked in the first year) and the show’s overall ambition, or lack thereof. Airing in first-run syndication rather than on a network saved it from becoming a swiftly forgotten, ill-advised follow-up to a 60’s classic, along with the devotion of fans so grateful for new Trek on TV that they stayed with it throughout its growing pains. (One wonders if the struggling Agents of SHIELD will likewise endure.) But I remember sitting on my mom’s bed glued to her television (the main one in our basement didn’t work most of the time) being thrilled by the sight of the Enterprise-D blasting through the warp barrier to travel beyond the boundaries of the universe to a place where thought and reality intertwined in “Where No One Has Gone Before,” and wondering how they could possibly make it back unharmed. I recall thinking how awesome it was to see the Klingons back causing trouble in “Heart of Glory.” I remember the nightmares I got when a guy’s head exploded under Picard and Riker’s phasers in “Conspiracy.” I remember the massive crush I had on Gates McFadden as Dr. Crusher and how stunning she looked made up as a 40’s moll in “The Big Goodbye.” And I remember obsessively checking Starweek to see when the next new episode was going to air – in fact, I believe I may have insisted that my mom purchase the Saturday paper strictly for that reason – and being crestfallen at the long wait between seasons one and two (thanks a lot, Writers Guild strike of ’88).

As wobbly as some of the earlier episodes of the show were, what endeared it to me and I suspect the majority of the fans, was the ever-present nobility of the characters, effortlessly upstanding in their morals and always trying to do right by the universe even when challenged at their very cores. Was it a realistic portrayal of human beings? Probably not. But we could aspire to be like them. The Next Generation provided that model for me as I grew through my teenage years and evolved from being embarrassed to admit I liked it lest the girls think I was weird, to going merrily to conventions and “talking Trek” with comrades at every opportunity – often to the chagrin of my best friend who’s indifferent to it to this day. As the show went on and I got older, I found my response to it evolving as well. My tastes were growing more sophisticated the more I learned about literature and history, and I found myself less than enamored with the show’s switch in its golden years to out-there-for-the-sake-of-being-out-there sci-fi premises and plots resolved through mindless technobabble. Maybe another time I’ll get into a detailed analysis of where I think things started to go wrong (it all began when they changed the style of the music late in Season Four), but by the end I was ready to vomit if I saw one more episode about reconfiguring the deflector dish to emit tetryon or verteron particles. And yet this too was a formative moment for me. Because it was when I began to think, “you know what? I could do better.” I understood there was no drama in pulling an imaginary subatomic particle out of the proverbial arse to deus ex the machina. That wasn’t how you told stories. Not well, anyhow. Not how I wanted to tell them, or how I wanted to see them being told.

As the number of episodes remaining in Season Seven dwindled, I was still watching, but with a sense of sadness at lost opportunities – “all the stories in the galaxy to tell and they did another broken holodeck episode? And why is the music so bad?” There were gems here and there but the entire enterprise (sorry) felt a bit like it was slumping to the finish line, with the creative energy diverted to getting Deep Space Nine up and running, but oh yeah, we’ve got this other one that I guess we have to pay some meager level of attention to. Stewart and the gang were giving it their all, but it was obviously time to go, just as the teenager inevitably turns twenty and braces for a new set of challenges. The finale, “All Good Things…,” was a great sendoff; not perfect, as it too relied on technobabble to solve the central dilemma, but it did top the gift with a beautiful bow in Captain Picard sitting down for the senior staff poker game for the first time and announcing that “the sky’s the limit.” It was a touching parting sentiment for myself as well, reminding me that I didn’t have to be satisfied with stories that didn’t give me what I wanted from them. Instead, I could create my own. The end of their journey was the beginning of my own.

And now I’m seeing it again, with my boy, and wondering how he’ll look back on it in future years – if it will ever mean as much to him as it does to me. If watching The Next Generation does nothing else for him, I hope it will at least inspire him, when he’s out on a clear night, to look up – and imagine what might lie out there in the stars.

Thanks to the modern miracle of wi-fi, I’m writing this in a Starbucks, where the scents of burnt coffee blend in an orgiastic melange with subliminal jazz and the tinny patois of the three teenage girls sitting to my left, cajoling one another with tales of romantic woes with such frequent interjections of the word “like” it might as well be in, like, a completely different language. I gather an acquaintance was at a young lad’s house overnight and the former somebody is obsessed with the latter, and another someone is totally getting engaged in Utah, omigod, make of it what you will. Shards of October are littered across the deep sienna tile in the form of fragments of leaves hitching rides in from the street on clumsy boots, and yet, November is in full swing inside, pumpkin spice abandoned for peppermint, gingerbread and hot apple cider, menus and cups transformed to holiday red.

The espresso machine whirs and spits milk foam, and the girls are on to complaining about work now, and while to each his own, I can’t help but smile a bit at the relativity of personal problems – what seems disastrous to one person is laughable to someone else. I guess the whole “First World Problems” meme is the perfect example of that; how dare we privileged few whine that our latte is weak when someone in the deserts of Sudan is crawling haggardly across the sand in search of a drop of water. I read a statistic a while back that if all seven billion human beings lived at the same standard as we do in the northwestern hemisphere, we would need four earths worth of resources to sustain everyone. I haven’t checked the star charts lately, but barring some unforeseen discovery I’m pretty sure this is it. Kinda makes it difficult to justify getting mad at an inadequate supply of chocolate shavings on a peppermint mocha.

This week has seen some interesting developments in the political sphere, particularly as it concerns two gentlemen whose continuing success seems the embodiment of global unfairness. First, Dick Cheney decided to cancel his trip to Toronto, where he was scheduled to give a speech to an economic forum, claiming that Canada was “too dangerous.” This followed a report that a group of lawyers had sent a letter to the Attorney General of Ontario demanding that Cheney be arrested on war crimes charges the moment he landed. Dodging small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades on the way to this cafe, as I often do, I wondered what on earth would possess anyone to want to go see a speech by Dick Cheney in the first place. Really, what was he going to tell the group of too-rich-for-their-own-good muckety-mucks ponying up for the ticket – how awesome it is to be wealthy and how the only way to become more wealthy is to screw the poor into the dirt even harder? There, I saved ol’ Six Heart Attacks the bother of the trip. But had he chosen to tread upon these allegedly too hazardous shores, he would have found his appearance swallowed up in the news by the Rob Fordpocalypse. The two men are truly a pair of poison kings: unrepentant bullies who always get away with everything because karma’s apparently asleep at the wheel. Confronted by the revelation that the Toronto police have the infamous “crack video” in their possession, and facing calls by all four major Canadian newspapers to step down and attend to his personal problems, Ford is pulling the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and bleating “na-na-na-na-I-can’t-hear-you.” We’ll see in the coming days and weeks whether he’s able to hang on to his office, but if and when he does go, it won’t be voluntarily, no matter what consequences Toronto suffers in the meantime. The man’s CN Tower-sized ego simply won’t permit him to express those magical little words, “I was wrong and I’m sorry.” Ultimately, that’s what the opponents of both men want. It isn’t to see them flayed or doing the perp walk in irons (though to be fair, in Cheney’s case that image would be particularly satisfying.) It’s wanting them to feel guilt and regret and shame and desperate wishes that they could somehow atone – you know, wanting them to be human. Cheney is probably too far gone, but Ford may have a semblance of a soul left. One can only live in hope that he will ultimately do the right thing, but I’m not a betting man. (At least not if his serial-enabling brother Doug has anything to do with it.)

And yet, what happens to Rob Ford and Dick Cheney affects my life as little as what the girls at the next table decide to do about their next shift at the restaurant, or about the girl who’s apparently getting engaged in Utah, omigod – so why worry about it? I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation involving a telepathic guest character who was so overwhelmed by the emotions and thoughts of others that it drove him to near madness. You can be paralyzed if you let all that stuff get to you. Yes, it’s awful that Dick Cheney will probably live out the rest of his life in ease and affluence after ruining the world for everyone else, but there’s no sense in shortening our own time on this troubled planet by stressing out about it. Nor is there much to be gained by spitting blood over the escapades of RoFo and DoFo. They’re certainly not up late worrying about us.

At the end of Casablanca, Rick tells Ilsa that the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world. Perhaps, but when you’re neck deep in beans that hill feels insurmountable – even if a stranger would look at you and scoff, wondering what the heck the big issue is. Much as how while I might feel that what these three girls are obsessing over is utterly trivial, so too would they think I’m an idiot for wasting my hour writing about the travails of the former U.S. Vice President and the Mayor of Toronto, two men I have never met and will likely never meet. At least they’re talking about people they know, people who matter to them, smiling and laughing and having a great time. I’m the solitary soul typing away in dour silence about strangers. Who’s better off? We are all our own little universe, after all, we define the shape of that cosmos with our individual hopes and dreams and fears, and it is not anyone’s place to say that universe doesn’t matter. That way lies the death of empathy and of compassion, of seeing others as human.

I eye the clock, drain the last of my lukewarm beverage, click save and shut down and slip the laptop back into the bag. And as I head for the door I wonder if by some quirk of fate one of those young women ends up reading the post their conversation inspired. Unlikely, of course, but you just never know. Cold air touches my face, and I step onward into the street and disappear.

Where do you get your ideas? That’s a question that everyone who fancies him or herself a writer is asked by someone at some point, with either a look of wonder or disgust on the questioner’s face (hopefully, it’ll always be the former). The Muse can be an elusive mistress; Lynda, my writing teacher, once advised that waiting around for her was an exercise in futility as she was more likely to dance just out of reach, laughing at you, and that you had to force her to the table by sitting down and starting without her. In that respect, schedules and deadlines certainly help a great deal, as we all know that the easiest thing to do in the world is not write.

Finding a subject for a blog post is not terribly difficult, even if the writing of said post is. There’s always lots going on in the world that we can comment on. I’m of the “more flies with honey” and “current or future employers might read this” mentality, so I’ll usually stop myself from venting about whatever is pissing me off lately and try to either write something positive or find an optimistic take on a particularly frustrating news item. (On a side note, my wife and I are watching the political drama House of Cards these past few nights and I’m finding it difficult to glom onto completely, for the singular reason that it is an utterly cynical program wallowing happily in the most selfish aspects of government service, and I’m much more drawn to the hopeful take offered by The West Wing. But Kevin Spacey is still awesome.) The blog, essentially, is a snapshot of how you’re feeling on any given day. A novel, by contrast, is a long term exercise in exploring an idea to its every possible limit. But which ideas are more deserving of the in depth treatment as opposed to the casual chat? How do you know which is which?

The summer after my mother died, I chained myself to my computer and started writing screenplays. That was what I was into at the time; for more on what led to this check out this previous post. Like many, my first ventures into serious writing were fan fiction, and in my case, Star Trek fan fiction. Although, I never managed to finish any of it – there’s an old hard drive rusting in a landfill somewhere full of the first chapters of stories about the crew of the Enterprise doing… well, not very much, actually. I couldn’t plot worth a damn at the time; I always figured I’d get to that part later on. What was more of a passion in the teenage years was drawing comic books, even though my artistic skill was minimal. And those were always James Bond stories, because they were easier to plot out. Bad guy doing bad thing, Bond must stop him, there’s a girl, a car chase, a gadget or two. For a high school creative project I wrote and drew a 007-Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover, where Bond is beamed aboard the Enterprise-D to help solve a Romulan conspiracy that involves his old adversaries SPECTRE, and along the way he manages to fall in love with Dr. Beverly Crusher (although in a downbeat ending, they have to go their separate ways). My English teacher loved it, her only criticism that it was a shame that I wasn’t using my own original characters. My rationale (read: excuse) was that using established characters freed you from having to introduce and develop your own, and enabled you to get right into the story instead. I didn’t understand at the time that the key to solving my inability to plot was to instead let the story flow out of the characters themselves.

But back to that summer. By that point I was using original characters, even if the dialogue they were speaking was almost entirely borrowed. That was about the time Pulp Fiction had come out and, as a film student at UWO, you could not take two steps into your classroom without hearing someone invoke the mighty Tarantino. I’d like to think that I wasn’t as obviously pretentious as some of the goatee-stroking, beret-wearing pomposities I sat in lectures with, but my work was just as derivative. My first full screenplay was about a group of kids in film school, with exhaustive, profanity-laden monologues about the hidden sexual themes in Star Wars (which, if you’ve seen Clerks, sort of puts the lie to the idea that these were in any way original characters.) I was still convinced that someday, someone would make this movie and I’d be accepting my Best Original (heh) Screenplay Oscar for it (then again, I was 20, recently orphaned and extremely naïve). Once that one was done, I started another, and then another. But they weren’t anything of note or even interest. I began to realize that they had no lasting value – because they weren’t about anything; there was no there there. And they certainly weren’t in my own voice.

The final screenplay was about a group of four 20-somethings who lived in the same apartment building (cough… Friends… cough). I know, it sounds dreadful, but I really enjoyed spending time with these particular people. As bad as some of those other screenplays were, they were an opportunity to hone my skill; to develop dialogue and subtext, to cut the profanity, to shed the influence of His Holiness Pope Quentin. When I typed FADE TO CREDITS, I realized I hadn’t been able to develop the characters in the way I’d wanted – the screenplay was about 170 pages (most genuine ones top out at 120, maximum) and I hadn’t said everything I needed to with these people. I decided to abandon it at first draft and instead turn it into a novel. And for the next two years I labored on this thing on and off. A great deal of my days were spent thinking about the lives of these people: Bryson Reid, aspiring writer and perpetual smartass, Krista Piper, alcoholic figure skater, Scott Shipley, advertising executive on the rise, and Lauren Devaney, Irish barista homesick for her native land. Part of Bryson’s story involved him meeting an entrancing and successful fantasy author named Serena Lane. And interspersed between the chapters about Bryson, Krista, Scott and Lauren were meant to be “excerpts” of Serena’s bestselling novel. The whole enterprise was designed to lead to a “shocking” metaphysical twist (not in the earlier screenplay version) whereby Serena was the same person depicted in the fantasy portions, who had somehow managed to cross into the real world (and it was the Irish barista, Lauren, who had authored the book in the first place, only to have it stolen by a manipulative publisher who was herself the villainess from the fantasy story and had also escaped from page into reality. “Serena Lane” would turn out to be the name of the street on which Lauren grew up in Dublin.) Anyway, it got up to 350,000 words with no end in sight. As I was writing it, I found I was enjoying the fantasy portions significantly more than the real world stuff. Bryson, in particular, although ostensibly the hero, was fundamentally unlikable and there were times I just wanted to smack him upside the virtual head. But I still felt the need to finish it.

Then one summer, I signed up for a local adult education course called “Crafting a Novel.” Naturally I knew how to write a novel, this was just a chance to meet some people (i.e. attractive, single women) with a similar passion. The first night of that class was a smack to the head much larger than the one I had wanted to give my fictional hero – I knew nothing. And I was crestfallen when Lynda told us that even if we had a book we had been working on for years, we were to set it aside and start a new one. To borrow a phrase from William Goldman, this was the ensuing sound inside my head:

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

Surely she wasn’t serious? My epic of Proustian magnificence deserved nothing less than endless streams of voluminous praise followed by a seven-figure publishing deal and movie rights! How could anyone dare me to set it aside?

In retrospect, thank frickin’ Buddha, but we’ll get to that.

After picking my jaw up from the floor that night, I decided to think about things a little more rationally. I’d slowly developed this fantasy world and enjoyed playing around in it. Couldn’t I set another story in the same place? And since prequels were all the rage, why not one that took place fifty years prior – something that might serve as a setup to the brilliance that was to follow? That took care of the setting, but I still needed characters and a worthwhile story to tell.

A few days later, I’m in a video game store perusing the PlayStation titles, and I wander over to the PC rack. There’s a game there, probably a precursor to World of Warcraft or something similar, and on it is a bunch of sketches of the characters. One of them strikes me. It’s a beautiful woman holding a mystical staff. It’s nothing terribly original; do a Google Images search for “sorceress” and you’ll see thousands of variations on the theme – some gorgeous, half-dressed knockout hurling lightning from manicured fingers. But something about it strikes me. And I ask myself, what must it be like to be her? Truthfully, the magical babe is a pretty boring staple of fantasy stories, either as a love interest, a physically unattainable spirit guide, or a cackling villainess bent on total domination of both the world and the hero’s crotch. In anything I’d ever read or seen up until that point, she was always treated merely as an other to be conquered or otherwise overcome. (Remember the witch in the first Conan the Barbarian movie? Beautiful and exotic, as befits magical babes, but doesn’t get a name and is in the story for all of four minutes, three of which are spent rolling around on the floor with our favorite muscled Cimmerian.) But if what would go through your head if you actually were a creature like that – would you go around thinking to yourself, “I am so willowy and ethereal and mysterious”? Or would your head be occupied by the same mundane thoughts the rest of us have – what to wear tomorrow, whether you left the iron on, did you feed the cat? After appearing and disappearing at will and turning men into pigs for a few hundred years, would you eventually grow bored with your powers? What could the immortal sorceress who has everything possibly want? Anything at all? Or would she be subject to the same emotional needs and longings as the rest of us mere human beings?

And there was the seed of my new story.

Coming up in future posts – more on creating characters, developing the plot, struggling with description, crafting dialogue, the necessary pain of killing your darlings and how Aaron Sorkin helped me find my voice without even knowing I exist.

A great deal of blogging advice says you shouldn’t talk about yourself. I think I’ve been pretty good about staying true to that axiom, presenting my take on world events rather than extolling the mundane details of my boring existence. This is one story about me however that I think is worth telling, not only because there’s a good lesson in it but because it involves my closest encounter with one of the biggest entertainment franchises on the planet – and if that doesn’t grab your interest, then don’t worry, I’ll be back to criticizing Republicans soon enough.

We flash back to an era when Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming to the end of its initial television run and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was taking over as the sole keeper of Roddenberry’s flame. I’d grown a bit disenchanted with TNG as even at that age I had figured out that stories about deus ex machina subatomic particles and other varieties of technobabble weren’t remotely as compelling as the richer, more character-driven pieces DS9 was attempting. The stories were more emotional and more consequential, as the space station couldn’t fly off at the end of the episode as the Enterprise could. Characters had to live with their choices, and their mistakes would continue to haunt them. For a young mind enamored with the idea of making storytelling his life’s pursuit, this was ambrosia. Imagination soared with potential adventures for Captain Sisko and company (yes, nitpickers, I know he was a Commander during the time I’m talking about, but just roll with it, okay?). Fortunately, because of a guy named Michael Piller who was one of the executive producers of the franchise at that point – and had arguably been responsible for turning TNG around after its wobbly first two seasons – those adventures did not have to remain confined to my brain alone.

Breaking into television writing is incredibly difficult because it’s a closed shop. If you have a great idea for an episode of say, True Blood, and mail a script in to HBO, you’ll get it back without it even having been opened. Too much history of litigation brought by angry writers hollering “You stole my idea!” has led to every single series accepting submissions and pitches only through registered agents. Short version – you can’t land a TV writing gig without an agent, and you can’t get an agent unless you’ve had a TV writing gig. When Michael Piller was running Star Trek, however, he enacted an open submission policy. Anybody could send something in and have it considered – didn’t matter if you were a groundskeeper from Bangladesh, so long as you could write in proper teleplay format and enclosed the correct postage, they’d look at it. Ronald D. Moore, who became one of Star Trek’s most prolific writers, working on Next Generation, DS9 and two of the movies before shepherding the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, was discovered in this way. It was possible – you didn’t need an “in” with somebody who worked there, you just had to write something that grabbed them. You had the same chance as everybody else.

Over the summer of 1993, as friends either slung burgers or soaked up rays on cottage docks, I got to work. I researched how to write a teleplay, learned about scene headings, dialogue formatting and stage direction, and started writing. My premise? It had been mentioned a number of times on DS9 that Dr Julian Bashir had been salutatorian in his graduating class at Starfleet Medical, that he’d messed up on a single question on the final that had resulted in him coming second. Obviously someone had beaten him and been valedictorian. What if this person came to the station? And what if it was a woman with whom Bashir had had a romantic history, but their competitive nature had dashed the possibility of a lasting relationship? What if they were forced back together to solve a mystery that threatened the entire station? Once those questions were in place, the teleplay came together fairly naturally. I opened with a scene on the Promenade between Bashir and Lt. Jadzia Dax. Dax is going over some personnel reports with a bored Bashir who is longing for some adventure to come into his life. (For fun, the names of the crewmembers Dax is discussing are all the last names of my closest friends.) Bashir notices a comely figure strolling across the Promenade – his old flame, the valedictorian herself, Dr. Sabrina Keller. Sparks ensue, old rivalries resurface, and eventually Bashir and Keller have to team up to save the station from a rogue comet that plays havoc with the Bajoran sun – a crisis in which all their shared medical expertise is worthless. I type this up in WordPerfect, print it out on my cheap dot matrix printer, bind it, label it and mail it off to Paramount Pictures, 5555 Melrose Avenue. And wait.

Fast forward to February 1994. I’m home from my first year of university on reading week. My family and I are coming home from an afternoon out when I spy a huge envelope shoved in our mailbox – from Paramount Pictures. It’s my original teleplay being returned, along with a pile of resources – the DS9 writers’ guide, copies of two previously produced teleplays and a form letter from Ronald D. Moore inviting me for a pitch meeting. For a 19-year-old Trekkie, the reaction resembles what happens to Louis del Grande’s character in Scanners.

They weren’t interested in purchasing the script I’d sent them, but they felt that I had shown promise and been able to write the characters’ voices well. They wanted to hear more. A few days later, I received a phone call from a very nice lady named April who was Moore’s assistant. She wanted to know if I’d received the material and if I was interested in pitching. I replied, naively and sheepishly, that I was a Canadian student and couldn’t afford to come to Los Angeles. After what I’m guessing was an eyeroll on her end, she explained that they took pitches over the phone. It’ll be a half hour conversation with one of the show’s writing producers during which you’ll present several story ideas. Well, in that case, of course I’ll do it, said I. Just one caveat – I’ll be back at university so here’s my dorm room phone extension. Thank you, said April, and she hung up, and I was left there feeling a bit shell-shocked, and intimidated that now I had to come up with at least five more stories for this meeting. Well, at least I had a whole month this time, unlike the year it took me to come up with the first one. Gulp.

A month fades away. I banish my roommate one night and sit on the bed awaiting this call, story ideas spread out around me, the Beastie Boys blaring from next door. The phone rings, it’s April again, and she tells me I’ll be pitching to René Echevarria, a writer whose episodes of both Next Gen and DS9 have been among my favourites. Echevarria comes on the line, we exchange brief greetings, and I launch into my pitches – beating down the butterflies roaring away in my stomach.

Star Trek has always been about big ideas couched in science fiction premises. The coolest space anomalies and weirdest aliens are meaningless if there isn’t a strong social message underneath. In coming up with my pitches I tried to start with the social message first and build the plot around it. The first story I pitched was about religious prejudice. The planet Bajor, which the Deep Space Nine station watches over, is a highly religious world. What if, I suggested, there was a minority of Bajoran atheists? And a few of them had done something really awful, like blowing up a monastery, resulting in every Bajoran who doesn’t believe in their religion being treated with disdain – the same way some blame every living Muslim for 9/11? Arriving on the station is one of these atheists, suspected of selling out his world to the Cardassians. He proclaims his innocence, and the Starfleet crew, who are secular, are more inclined to sympathize with him than the religious Bajoran Major Kira, who hates this guy sight unseen. A few twists and turns later, it’s revealed – after the atheist is shot dead while affecting a very unsubtle Christ-like pose on the Promenade – that he wasn’t selling anyone out, he was buying time for his family to escape from Bajor. Bajor’s conservative attitudes take another black eye as Kira is forced to reevaluate what she believes.

Echevarria doesn’t waste a beat. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the story, he says, but for the third season they are trying to reinvent Bajor as a happier, more positive place for the audience to sympathize with and root for, and this would run contrary to that objective. Plus there are a couple of plot holes he doesn’t like. What else ya got?

I move on to my next story. I’d always been fascinated by the concept of the “red shirt” – the nameless, non-speaking security officer who dies and is never thought of again. I opened the story with a shootout on the station, and one of these guys goes down. You are supposed to think nothing of it. But we stay with his story as Security Chief Odo is filling out the paperwork regarding his death. His name is Warrant Officer Charles F. Kensing (deliberate allusion to Citizen Kane, which my film class had screened recently), and as Odo digs deeper, it turns out he wasn’t a random casualty, he was a deliberate target as part of a conspiracy involving Starfleet Intelligence that leads all the way to Commander Sisko himself.

Echevarria isn’t sold on this one either. He doesn’t buy that Sisko would keep Odo in the dark the way I’ve suggested. The entire plot could have been resolved by the two simply having a forthright conversation. Next.

I re-pitch the valedictorian story. I’ve tweaked it since my original script to play up the romance and competition angles, and sharpen the sci-fi mystery element. But it’s still a no-go. Echevarria tells me they featured the valedictorian in a recent episode that has yet to air at the time I’m speaking with him. (When the episode does air, although the valedictorian is female, her name is Dr. Elizabeth Lense, and not only does she have no romantic history with Bashir, she doesn’t even know who he is – and their fairly forgettable encounter is an unrelated B-plot in a story about Sisko and his son Jake building an interstellar sailing ship.)

With his comments about making Bajor a happier, sunnier place, I know he’s not going to like my last story before I even start in on it. It’s a dark tale about a Bajoran militia exercise involving teenage cadets, and Jake Sisko somehow being shoehorned into taking part. Eventually he is forced into killing one of these cadets to save another and grapples with the consequence of having taken a life. I can feel the cringing on the other end of the phone – it just isn’t happening for me tonight.

Finally, Echevarria thanks me for my pitches. He asks a little about me and is surprised when I tell him I’m 19. He also invites me back to pitch again. Clearly he senses that there’s some potential to be harvested here. I’m a bit apologetic about some of the stories that he’s passed on and he laughs it off, saying, and I quote, “you wouldn’t believe some of the shit people pitch.” We exchange goodbyes and I hang up. Looking back on it now I can see how every one of those stories wasn’t ready for prime time, but the experience itself was invaluable. It showed me at a very young age that I could play with the big boys – that my writing was good, that it could stand up to professional scrutiny. And the door hadn’t been closed – they were willing to hear more. I had my “in.”

You may be wondering now, two thousand words on, why I titled the post “Gather ye rosebuds.” As you can gather based on the fact that you’ve never seen my name in the credits of a Star Trek episode, I never took them up on Echevarria’s invitation to pitch again. Not long after this call, my mother’s cancer worsened and she landed in hospital, never to emerge. Star Trek stories were the very last thing on my mind. I don’t blame myself for not ever following up, at least, not to the degree where I mope about it constantly. Life, as John Lennon observed, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. But these days, as I try to build a writing career, I think back to my “big break” and reflect on how I could have made better use of it. Honestly, I was lazy and I chickened out. I made excuses. I could have fought through the grief – used it, shaped my pain into heart-rending adventures for Captain Sisko’s crew. Perhaps. For whatever reason, at the time I was not in the mood to try. So I let the opportunity slip away like sand through fingertips. DS9 is long off the air, Michael Piller has passed on and the open submission policy on television is history. And René Echevarria certainly doesn’t remember me.

As the summer of 2012 draws to a close and new opportunities begin to present themselves, I’m determined to gather my rosebuds while I may, even if they may be fewer. Carpe occasio. That’s the advice I take from my Star Trek experience, and the best advice that the relating of this tale can bestow upon anyone. Don’t chicken out of life. The perfect time never comes. And as they said in Vanilla Sky, every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. So send that book in. Get your blog going. Publish that article. Submit your screenplay. And if someone gives you a break, grab onto it and push until it hurts, until your fingers are bleeding and your arms are ready to fall off. You have nothing to lose and the world to gain.

For those weary of the blatant Sorkin-worship on this blog, I promise this will be the last of him for a little while. But as he often does, he has inspired me to try my hand at something a little offbeat today. I would never claim to be half the wordsmith he is, but Sorkin does have a particular style that can be mimicked by us lesser mortals who have studied his works a little too obsessively. Behold then, for your amusement, Star Trek: The Next Generation as written by Aaron Sorkin. Hope you dig. (Sorry about the pdf, but script format doesn’t seem to want to play well here. And oh yeah, characters copyright Paramount Pictures, no infringement intended, purposes of parody, so on and so forth.)

As I’ve discussed before, language, and particularly the English language, is in continuous motion. While I’m all in favour of conjuring new words and phrases as our little rock spins silently around its mother sun, I’m not so keen on the ongoing mangling of the lexicon we already have. What is most frustrating is how much of this misuse becomes societally acceptable and adopted into common parlance. One grating example, timely with the summer Olympics unfolding in London later this year, is the transformation of the word “medal” into a verb. As in, “the Canadian team is poised to medal in the fifth race,” when the proper phrasing would be “the Canadian team is poised to win a medal in the fifth race.” I first encountered this malapropism during the broadcast of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and, though it was pointed out at the time as incorrect, to my chagrin “medal-as-a-verb” managed to infect all subsequent television coverage of Olympic events. I can’t quite figure out why this usage arose – were the colour commentators simply too lazy to say two syllables, “win a,” or was it a conscious decision to remove the element of competition from this, you know, athletic competition? Like how they now always say “And the Oscar goes to,” instead of “And the winner is,” because being nominated alone is supposedly enough of a win. (Tell that to the runner-up in every election in history.) The endgame of this will be, of course, the use of the individual medal colours as verbs. “Schmidt silvered in the downhill yesterday, this is a disappointment from when he golded four years ago.” So the bronzer I buy at the drugstore will, apparently, now help me win Olympic third-place medals. Perhaps – if I’m competing on Jersey Shore.

I’m really not that much of a grammatical Puritan. In fact if you go back and read through these 55 posts so far you’re likely to find plenty of split infinitives, dangling modifiers, lapses of British versus American English and even the occasional occurrence of E. Henry Thripshaw’s disease (Google it). But if there’s a common thread running through everything I write, it is my desire for us to do better as a species – to always aim for the greatest heights. If we fall short, it shouldn’t be because we didn’t try hard enough. Which is why the lazy use of language infuriates me – it’s the sign of an unengaged intellect. I’m not talking about slang, that’s a different category altogether. I’m more concerned with writing and dramatic presentations that are full of amateur mistakes, from people who should know better. Few cinematic experiences are as disappointing as watching accomplished Shakespearean performers reciting dialogue that is just plain wrong. The 90’s Star Trek shows were horrific offenders in this regard. One episode of The Next Generation had a scene where Captain Picard was talking about the Borg and he said something along the lines of “their entire existence was centered around acquiring cultures and technology.” Centered around. So many shows make this mistake. You can’t center around something. You can center on it, but not around it. But even that doesn’t compare to the most egregiously misused word, one that causes my blood pressure to rise several points every time it emerges, like sandpaper against skin, from an actor’s mouth: Aggravating.

You might be thinking, “What’s wrong with that? That guy who cut me off on the highway this morning was really aggravating. My co-worker forgetting to refill the photocopier really aggravates me.” For the love of Oscar Wilde, no! What you mean to say is irritating. Aggravating means to exacerbate, to make something worse, like, “Eating hot peppers aggravates my heartburn.” If bad drivers or your co-worker’s laziness are getting up your back, it’s irritating you. I suspect what has happened is that people have latched onto the “gra..ting” part of aggravating and confused it with grating, resulting in this strange substitution of one word for the other. And, like “medal-as-a-verb,” “aggravating-as-irritating” seems to be finding more and more societal acceptance. I hear it from the mouths of colleagues, superiors, friends, and in almost all of my favourite TV programs. I daresay it’s almost a lost cause at this point – but I’m doing my part to try and reclaim its proper meaning, without being that guy who’s smugly correcting everyone else’s grammar. Otherwise, all the irritation I feel at the misuse of aggravation and its variations will be fruitless stress, and there are much bigger things to worry about.

Like the many other mysteries of English, including why incense can be thought of as calming, while to be incensed is to be utterly outraged. Then again, that’s what the ad wizards live for. “Feeling incensed? Try incense!”

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Your humble narrator

Hello, good day, and welcome! I'm Graham, this is my site and herein you'll find a collection of thoughts about our wide world and the people in it. Feel free to browse around a bit, leave a comment and let me know what you're thinking. Scribo, ergo sum.

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